Follow You Down To The Red Oak Tree
by AmySparkles
Summary: Nick tries to talk someone down, but sometimes its just hard to find a distinction... 'Shock Waves' spoilers...


_**Hi Guys, well this little piece is just my reaction to one awesome Nick episode.. I loved 'Shock Waves' and George just about killed me with every scene.. So much emotion.. Anyway I hope you enjoy this, I was on my way to and from Wexford today so I decided to bring my laptop and do some writing.. This was the result.. The title is actually the name of a great song by James Vincent-McMorrow, a Dublin singer-songwriter with heaps of talent.. Go have a listen if you have a spare minute.. :)**_

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'I'm not like you, alright.'

'Yeah, you are.'

'No, no, no.' He was losing him.

'You're just giving into your impulses. I can't.' The last two words were quiet. They were said with a slight hint of regret, as if the speaker wanted nothing more than to keep them bottled up.

'Why not?' He seemed intrigued, enough to stop pacing so much.

'Because people care about me and however much I hate myself they've already been hurt because of me.' Nick remembered the pain he saw in everyone's eyes when they came to see him in the hospital after he was buried. He felt guilty, like it was all his fault. The doctors had a pill for that though and he soon learned to forget.

'They won't care.' His voice trembled.

'Yes they will. If you do this then wherever you end up you're just going to regret it. Trust me.' A little voice inside his head laughed, how could he possibly know?

'Trust you? You seem just as messed up as me, man. Why the hell should I listen to you?' He had a very valid point, Nick just didn't want to point it out.

'Because I'm your last hope, if I wasn't here your brains would be sprayed all across that wall and I know you don't want that.' He didn't know that, but two people dying on his watch in the space of a month couldn't be a good thing.

'Maybe I do.' It was quiet. Nick wouldn't have heard it except that they were alone. There wasn't anyone around to hear the honest exchanges.

'Just give me the gun, okay?'

'Why? So you can use it instead.' This made Nick flinch, he hadn't fired his gun since he freaked out when Jason McCann's brother was killed. He was dreading the moment he would have to use it. Every time he touched the smooth cold metal his mind would drift back to the restaurant where it all started. Everything was ruined there, sure he had bad things happen to him before but he could always find solace in the mundane aspects of his job, such as cleaning his gun. Not anymore.

'What's the matter hero, did I offend you?'

'_I know your heart's in the right place, Nick, but…'_

'_You've already been a hero today…'_

He hated that word. Hero. He was anything but. In the days after the shooting he had gotten labelled with that word a lot. A pat on the back here, a smile there. All the while a widow cried herself to sleep at night. Alone.

'_Would you want you backing you up right now?' _

He was always there for his friends, he would do anything for them. He had done it in the past and he would do it in the future in a heartbeat. Maybe that was why Catherine's words had stung so much. He would become a liability soon if he wasn't careful. Everybody had a comment to make, whether it be advice or a smart remark. They all stung though, like tiny daggers digging their way into his shoulder in search of the bullet from the night that had changed everything.

He knew it probably wasn't his best idea yet; comparing himself to the victim and telling him what was going on inside his head. What he wouldn't tell the others, not even the shrink. It made him too invested in the conversation. He could miss something, like a slight twitch of a finger on the trigger. Something inside him had opened up though, he could tell a complete stranger waving a gun around what had happened to mess his head up but he could barely talk to Brass when he tried to get him to open up.

'I'm not a hero. Neither are you.'

'Oh yeah, how do you know?'

'What kind of hero waves a gun around. What kind of hero is so fucking selfish that he tries to do this.' Nick raised his gun to his head and stood like a reflection of the man in front of him.

'What are you doing?' He looked worried, suddenly he had swopped positions with Nick without any kind of warning.

'The same as you.'

'Stop it, why are..'

'Why? Because according to you this is all there is left, who am I to argue?'

'It's… I mean, you…' His eyes were roaming around the room as a drop of sweat rolled down his cheek.

'What, are you afraid? I thought you weren't afraid of death.' The nozzle rested against his temple and he felt the cold seep into his mind. It was comforting, he felt grounded by the contrast.

'I'm not… It's… I just…' He was getting frustrated because he wasn't in control anymore. Nick watched as his grip on the gun began to waver, it was still too close for comfort though.

'What was that? I'm sorry I missed what you said.' Nick knew it wasn't exactly smart to be provoking someone who very nearly blew his brains out a couple of minutes ago.

'Stop. I mean it, stop.' The gun slipped a little lower as he began to panic. His voice all the while rising louder.

'Why should I? I'm just like you and this is your only way out so it must be my only one too.' Nick heard the words coming from his mouth but tried to ignore their meaning, he tried to distance them from his won thoughts. He could pretend as if this was the proper way to act in the situation, as if he had been told to do it. He walked forward, closing the distance between the two.

'No… It's not, you can't just…' Nick saw the turning point, they had reached the horizon where everything had order. He continued to push.

'I could just get it over with. Not have to keep carrying the guilt around with me, right?' He saw the clogs turning in the man's head. His eyes were roaming across the floor, focusing anywhere but Nick's face.

'Please… You...' It was strange how much their situation had changed since earlier. Looking back, there were probably warning signs at every turn.

'What?' Come on tell me.' Nick shoved the gun against his temple harder. This caused the man to visibly flinch as if Nick had used him as the pin cushion.

'Don't… do anything... please, not here.' There it was, Nick saw it in his eyes. Nobody wanted another person's blood on their hands.

'It wasn't your fault. What you told me earlier? You couldn't have stopped it.' Something inside Nick sank, his face dropped and the gun suddenly weighed a tonne. His breathing slowed, it was like someone had pulled the plug on the world. If there was any noise before Nick no longer heard it, just the fast rushed breathing of the man in front of him and his own shallow breaths.

'What?'

'You said earlier that it was all your fault but… I think you were just doing your job, how were you supposed to know anything like that would happen?' The man finally looked Nick in the eye but all Nick saw was a cloudy image of him. He could feel the tears already forming, threatening to spill over. He promised himself he would stop crying. When he was six he had hit his sister with a baseball by accident, he felt so guilty that he cried, until his father told him that crying doesn't fix anything it just draws attention to it.

'Why?... How… How do you know anything about what is or isn't my fault, you weren't there.' Nick's mind was having trouble keeping up, all of a sudden he was the wreck on the end of a gun.

'When you told me about it, I could tell that you would give every moment of your life to go back and fix it.' The man was looking deep into Nick's eyes. The room behind the man faded away as Nick focused on his dark eyes.

It was as though he was suddenly outside his own body, watching the scene playing out in front of him. He saw how stupid he was being and moved his arm slowly. It felt as though everything was moving in slow motion, seconds slipping by as if they were hours. A distant and familiar sound broke through his thoughts as though someone had only just woken him from a month of sleep. His gun dropped to the floor beside him with a thud.

'Wait, why are there cops coming? I thought you said I could just walk away from this.' He was panicking again, his eyes watching the window like it was gold.

'You can't.' Nick's voice felt foreign to his ears, it was low with no hint of a Texan twang or even any emotion.

'No, wait I can't just…' His pleas were cut off as Brass revealed himself through the door followed by more police officers.

'You're a murderer. There's no easy way out this time.' Brass' hard edged voice cut through the room like a knife. Nick turned to look at him and noticed the rough way in which he handcuffed the man. On any other day Nick wouldn't have given it another thought but tonight he watched, fascinated by how the man was treated. He was a murderer and Nick had killed Jekyll. He was a murderer and Clarke was dead.

There is a fine line between heroes and villains. The trouble only coming when a person needs to find the separation.

'It wasn't loaded, right? Your gun…' The man had a smile plastered across his face as Brass pulled him outside and towards a car, like someone realising they had just been taken for every penny by Santa Claus.

His smile faltered as he looked up and into Nick's eyes. They were dark, like he had touched the depths of something long forgotten. His eyes would brighten again but the trouble was that each time he resurfaced, it would be with another scar dragging him back down.

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_**Well, how was that for you? :) As always I love to hear your opinion, good or bad.. Thanks so much for reading :)**_


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